Gripping Narrative Peters Out

David Poyer is best known for thrillers like The Circle and The Only Thing to Fear -- which has the young Jack Kennedy heading off a plot to assassinate FDR.

In Thunder on the Mountain Poyer again returns to the past, this time evoking the proletarian tradition of John Steinbeck and Jack London to produce a thriller that provides a wild ride before it peters out at the end.

It's 1936 in western Pennsylvania, the birthing ground of the American oil industry. Daniel Thunner is the third man in his family to head Thunder Oil Company. He lives in a mansion with his perpetually sickly wife and young daughter, and lunches with plutocrats who entertain each other with Eleanor Roosevelt jokes.

Only Daniel and the reader know that Thunner and Thunder have hidden problems. Daniel had a lot of company money in the '20s stock market -- he even speculated with the pension fund. "Who could have believed," he muses, "that half the wealth Americans had accumulated in three hundred years could vanish into thin air like mist on the hills?"

Disaster strikes. A fire at the plant kills five men; they are roasted to death on the high iron, unable to get down because the rivets had rusted off the escape ladder. "People killed because Dan Thunner won't spend a dime," someone says, planting a seed that blooms when Thunner cuts the workers' pay by 10 percent. He'd let insurance lapse to save money. The walkouts begin.

The reluctant epicenter of the agitation is W.T. Halvorsen, "twenty, lanky and blond." He's a "well shooter," a man who uses nitro to reopen blocked oil wells, though through an ironic fluke he's become a pet of Dan Thunner. The boss saw him duking it out with a troublemaker, liked his style, and gave him the training to fight at company stags. But Halvorsen's girlfriend's brother is one of the five killed in the fire. He knows where his loyalties lie.

Then Doris Golden comes to town. She's a labor organizer, she says, sent by the CIO to teach the men how to do it. The locals call her a "Bolshie" and, well, she does say things like "the bourgeois world view." But her message to the strikers is direct: "The worker creates everything you see. The only reason you don't own it all is that you don't know your own strength."

A few pages later we meet Deatherage, a mean-eyed professional strikebreaker. Like Doris Golden, he has his own agenda: His money really comes from fomenting violence, not quelling strikes. He's a creature of such reptilian fascination that the book is most alive when he's around, puffing Old Golds, drinking Thunner's Scotch and saying, "You've got to go for the throat, Dan. There's only going to be one winner here."

Mob violence follows. Beatings. Sabotage. A workman's child dies because there is no money to heat the house. Murder is done. And meetings. And speeches. And it's all told in a rich, flowing, organic prose that could bring the Old Masters to envy. The reader can smell the petroleum gushing from nozzles, feel the bitter northern cold that freezes the marrow, taste snowflakes and cigarette smoke, whiskey and coffee. The prizefight and deer-hunt sequences are worthy of Jack London.

But then, as it roars to its conclusion, the book becomes another pop novel. After powerhouse chapters, we suddenly have an all-or-nothing boxing match that is supposed to settle the strike, a fink who finds his manhood in self-sacrifice, a killing chase through a dark building that looks borrowed from a cop novel. Entertaining as it is, it's blowzy nonsense, and it's painful to watch Poyer sell out his material for miniseries melodrama.